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    Found Exhortation (Dysfunctional)

    I don’t think anyone ever feels better for being told they ought to–whether emotionally or physically. To help someone else or our self to feel or get better, it is far more productive to offer well wishes or offer loving or healing energy or to take action the likely result of which is to improve health or mood.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    What My New Smart Phone Is Teaching Me About Yoga

    I spent nearly three hours talking with tech support just to get the phone authorized.  And once that was accomplished, the guy helping me also was unable to figure out how to transfer my contacts from the old phone to the new.  Last night, on the second full day, I opened every item in settings just to learn about this piece of technology and found another way to transfer contacts than tech support had tried.  Hooray!  I didn’t have to enter them manually one by one.

    So it’s like this:  no matter how brilliant a system, if I didnt learn how to use it, I wasn’t going to get any benefits.  The more I studied and practiced, the more I would be able to use it in a way that enhanced my daily life.  Although a teacher is necessary, it takes our own thorough, steady, and attentive practice to empower ourselves and expand our limits.

    I had thoroughly resigned myself to typing.  Now I will have more time to figure out how to resize photos.  That may feel less urgent.  It’s busy at work, and the garden, yoga mat, meditation cushion, library, and beautiful weather call me to them.

    image

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    Vacation

    I am delighted to be going on a short trip to a warm place (Tucson) to do nothing but yoga and visit with friends and acquaintances.

    My work life is such for the next several months that I cannot take a long vacation.  I can find a few days here and there, though, and it is critical to my working well.  I find if I work with too much effort or for too many hours or days in a row, I lose my sense of humor and my creativity.  These are truly essential components of doing a good job.

    If you cannot get away for a day or two or five, take five minutes to just breathe without following your thoughts.  It is not a vacation.  It is meditation.  It will not serve in the way of a vacation, but it will provide a needed break from attachment (perhaps to the point of misalignment) with the mindstuff (citta) and will enable you to continue with your efforts more at peace with both the efforts and yourself.

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    Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether

    We are composed of nothing different than earth, water, fire, air, and space, and much of yoga practice  (as are related practices such as ayurveda) is designed to recognize and align our elemental identity.  It is human nature to manufacture, just as it is the nature of a beaver to make a dam or a termite to make a mound of mud that displaces what was in its path.  Why then is it so common to  think of man-made as completely separate from “nature” rather than to recognize the wild and extraordinary creations of humans as an integral part of the complex fabric of being on this planet?

    Photos taken on a Thanksgiving trip shared with friends and family:  DC to NJ, Cape Cod, and back to NJ before heading home. Without the time on highway and train, I could not have seen so much “nature” in so short a time.  Nor, might I add, would I have appreciated being out exposed to the wind and water without the shelter and protection of manufactured goods (including houses, cars, and clothing, etc).  This does not mean, of course, that to live better, we should not seek to balance and diminish our consumption of resources for our protection and comfort.

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